senses.

*

It has been pointed out by a recent writer that there is a progressive refinement in the action of the different Touch has primarily to do with solids coming into direct contact with the organ, taste with a liquid medium, smell with particles carried by a gas, hearing with vibrations in a gas, and seeing with vibrations in an ether. And this advance in power to appreciate finer qualities of matter, and discern to greater distances in nature, together with the well-known fact that certain persons have a peculiar power of "reading the thoughts," has led him to the speculation that a special sense may yet be developed enabling men to divine thoughts by a kind of clairvoyance; an induction of thought, or direct action of soul on soul. On the theory of evolution it is highly probable that the senses were developed in organisms in the order named; and we may institute a parallel between their evolution and the spiritual evolution of mankind. At first men groped about after God, and perceived Him in tangible things, then gradually rose to higher knowledge of Him. New spiritual senses were given them as they were required. At last came Christ, who looked on God as the intelligent eye of the original man would gaze upon the sun. Perhaps the whole human race will, in the days to come, acquire a direct sense of God's presence in the universe, similar in kind to that which was possessed by Jesus. And, if not on earth, perhaps it will be granted us when we have laid aside the garments of mortality.

Such a power is recorded of Christ, and it would seem miraculous to His followers, even though due to natural evolution.

CHAPTER V.

THE NEW EVANGELS.

How is it that our modern thought
Has travelled from these sacred ways,
And every certain truth is bought

By parting with some Faith and praise?
We light our earth with the quenched rays

Of heaven; and yet we only seek
Truth for the strong and for the weak,
Loving it more than length of days

Or the ruby lip and the blooming cheek.

'Tis wisdom, doubtless, for the man

To learn the fact and steadfast law :

Yet wisdom also in its plan

Embraced the child's great wondering awe
Which found the Unseen in all it saw;
Whom now we seek with cruel strain
Of longing heart and wildered brain,
Tossing our barren chaff and straw
In search of the old diviner grain.

From Olrig Grange.

IN the whole history of the Christian religion there probably never was a period when doubt and infidelity were as rife in Christian countries as they are at present. England is no exception to the rule. The conflict of heretical opinions among her leading thinkers, and the cultured classes who share their society and hearken to their teaching, is a notorious trait of the times. Philosophers who have grown grey in poring over test-tubes and microscopes, assure us

that the soul is nothing more than a cluster of molecules which death shall for ever disperse; that God is either an ideal myth or an inscrutable Power, whose real nature baffles the heart and bewilders the brain. Weaned from their allegiance to Christ, our poets long to join in the vanished festivals of Apollo; and freed from the burden of the Cross, they languish for the seductive licence of paganism. Even within the pale of the Church herself there are ministers tainted with the prevailing scepticism, who either overtly preach or secretly believe some heterodox version of the old creed; and callow freshmen at the universities improve their leisure in chattering about Christianity as a defunct superstition, to be relegated ere long to the lumberroom of fossil faiths. The upper classes, early infected by the decay of the old belief and the ferment of new ideas, have become cynically corrupt; the middle classes, though they have to a great extent caught the same mental epidemic, have borne up better against it, owing perhaps to their busy lives; and only the lower classes are as yet comparatively exempt from the prevailing malady.

This lamentable state of society is largely due to the spread of materialism, whatever eminent materialists may urge to the contrary. By teaching that every event taking place in the world is the result of mechanical laws and never of any supernatural agency, positive science deprives Christianity of its miraculous element, and shatters our faith in the gospels and the divinity of Jesus Christ. the work of spiritual demolition thus begun, materialism adds the finishing stroke by announcing that the soul perishes with the body; and that nothing exists but matter and motion.

To

It would appear, however, that men can not be happy

without a faith of some kind, and since the old one has been discarded, by many persons, they have found it necessary to manufacture new ones. We will examine some of these latter-day evangels.

Beginning with materialism, we find that there are two sorts of it, mild materialism and rank materialism. Dr. Tyndall is, perhaps, the chief exponent of the first kind, while the German professor, Haeckel, is the great mouthpiece of the second. In the eyes of Dr. Tyndall a red-hot star is a fiery embryo, out of which endless forms of life and beauty will develop by its inherent potency. "Supposing," he writes,

a planet carved from the sun, and set spinning round its axis, and revolving round the sun at a distance from him equal to that of our earth, would one of the consequences of its refrigeration be the development of organic forms? I lean to the affirmative. Structural forces are certainly in the mass, whether or not these forces reach to the extent of forming a plant or an animal. In an amorphous drop of water lie latent all the marvels of crystalline force and who will set limits to the possible play of molecules in a cooling planet? If these statements startle, it is because matter has been defined and maligned by philosophers and theologians who are equally unaware that it is at bottom essentially mystical and transcendental."*

Dr. Tyndall further regards the animal body as a piece of mechanism kept at work by consuming the blood, which is the "oil of life;" "but," says he, "in affirming that the growth of the body is mechanical and that thought, as exercised by us, has its correlative in the physics of the brain, I think the position of the materialist is stated as far as that position is a tenable one. . . If you ask him

*Fragments of Science, 6th edit.

whence is this matter of which we have been discoursing, who or what divided it into molecules, who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these questions. But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared with a solution? To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? Let us bow our head and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all."*

In this cautious confession of faith, or rather of nonfaith, it will be seen that the claims of Holy Writ are entirely ignored.

Professor Haeckel goes far beyond Dr. Tyndall, and boldly asserts a positive creed, which he has termed Monism in opposition to the Dualism of divines, which would affirm the universe to consist of both matter and spirit. According to monism there is only one force acting on matter, namely, mechanical force; and as for mind, it is a quality of all matter. By the play of mechanical force and matter the universe is evolved in a regular and rational manner like the working of a great machine. The theory of descent, or transformism, which explains the origin of living types by change of shape due to mechanical causes, is an essential part of monism: and the theory of selection, or Darwinism, is until now the chief among the different theories which try to explain this transformation.

Not content with a description of the general process of development, Dr. Haeckel attempts to trace its actual steps, and he has therefore drawn up a "Stamm-baum," or family tree, to illustrate the pedigree of man.

From this interesting archive, we learn that, some time

*Fragments of Science, 6th edit.